Get a bike horn, honk at them, bring your camera or cell phone, take a picture of their car and license plate, report them to the police etc. Just try to control your temper and not get yourself into more trouble. People are going to try and run you over all the time out there, nothing you can do about it by beating up one car or driver.

Now yelling at a car or honking etc. is legal, if they driver stops and tries to attack you with deadly force like with a knife or tire iron, then shoot them dead. That’s why I carry when I ride. I’m not going to shoot at someone from almost running me over, but if someone turns around and tries to use their car as a weapon, or gets out and tries fighting me with deadly force I WILL stop the fight, I don’t fight, I stop fights from progressing to where I might get hurt, that’s why I carry.

I’ve had people throw thing at me, I’ve had people play chicken with me, that to me goes above and beyond just careless driving to me that in some cases could be considered use of deadly force against the cyclists, and an armed response would be appropriate. I almost got ran over by someone playing chicken with me out on some country road. The driver cross the over the median over to the wrong side of the road to play chicken with me and came within a foot or so of me. If I would have had a gun at the time I would have riddled the back of his car for trying to almost kill me. Another time I almost got mauled by a vicious pitbull when out for a run in the country side, this aggressive breed of dog wasn’t even tied up at all. I was probably 100 feet running beyond their property line when the dog charged me, luckily my reflexes took over and I was able to kick the dog square in the head and turn it around 180 degrees and it ran straight back to the house after a full on charge. Since I was a kid I didn’t own a handgun but if I did and had it with me that day I would not have thought twice about shooting that dam dog.

I’ve been bit in the face and attacked a couple other times growing up by dogs and I love dogs, but if an animal tries to hurt me I won’t think twice about stopping it, the same goes for a road rage driver that threats me with deadly force.

I suggest that all able bodied cyclists carry a gun with them for safety, BUT also that you obey the law and be a vigilantly and try to damage cars or threaten drivers and start fights. You’ll be the one in trouble if you start a fight then end up having to shoot them to defend yourself, it will look very bad for you.

And to the person that tries and say just carry pepper spray, I say you go and try that when a big mean dog is charging you at full speed, or someone is swinging a tire iron at you and it’s windy out. Heck even if you’re lucky enough to hit them in the face there’s a good chance they’ll still be able to grab hold of you, bite you, strike you anyway.

I don’t dispute that your cretinization is complete. As to the rather unlettered claim above, which seems to suggest that Mohamed Atta and his conspirators are still victims, or ever were, I’d have to say, yes, I dispute it. For one thing, they’re dead by their own hand. For another, they constituted the most privileged classes in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and burned hundreds of fellow Muslims on 9/11 while trying to kill as many innocent people as they thought feasible.

How does that “slap” sound now, big boy?

agree or disagree, but get over it. besides, i didn’t equate the terrorism doled out by bicyclists with the terrorism doled out by the 9/11 folks and i didn’t equate the terrorism doled out by the 9/11 folks with the terrorism doled out by the u.s. government in iraq, afghanistan, and other places – they are all very different in scope and magnitude, obviously – by orders. and that is completely besides the point.

Writers write, killers kill, and terrorists terrorize. Wiki has this for a definition:

Terrorism is a term used to describe violence or other harmful acts committed (or threatened) against civilians by groups or persons for political or ideological goals (fear in latin).

And don’t give me the old ‘governments cannot be terrorists’ line. That’s a fairy tale for children.

As for words to describe the 9/11 terrorists – we already have plenty of words that were and are perfectly capable of describing them accurately – ‘criminals’, ‘perpetrators’, etc. And we already have plenty of legal avenues to pursue criminals, domestically and overseas. That the U.S. government chose to disregard international law and the will of the American people and the world is on the U.S. government. Most of us wanted the law to be obeyed, but our government didn’t listen.

Of course, the hijackers and their friends and families and neighbors and their countries as a whole were and continue to be victims. Does anyone dispute this?

He claims the knife-wielding driver who responded to a simple trunk slap with completely over-the-top threats of murder was the “victim” in his situation

Yes – of course. The biker was the original ‘victim’, and things quickly escalated from there. It’s completely predictable.

so…obviously some American overseas “acted tough” and slapped somebody’s trunk…

i guess you could call rape/murder/occupation/oppression on a mass scale a ‘trunk slap’, but i suppose that would leave you very confused about why 9/11 happened. for me, i’m not confused at all – 9/11 was completely predictable in as much as we knew that retaliation was surely coming, and we may have even known exactly how and when it was coming – thought that remains in some dispute – but we surely knew it was coming. why did we know it was coming? well – we were very aware that our various crimes overseas, from propping up corrupt dictatorships to engaging in various foreign occupations and support of various occupations were breeding mass resentment, for starters. it’s not rocket science. it’s not like this stuff has not been documented in the official record and released portions of the secret record for over a decade, now. read a little.

you don’t have to agree on what is or isn’t an appropriate response to various acts of terrorism to recognize the problem and deal with it effectively. for instance, the proper reaction to a trunk slap might be some kind words like, “Hey f******e – why did you slap my trunk??”, but what you often get is physical confrontations, violence and threats of violence – terrorism committed by terrorists. Similarly, if a few dudes fly planes into buildings you might expect the proper reaction to be pursuing the criminals and their co-conspirators in courts of law and punish them according to internationally agreed-upon standards of justice – using, say, the ICC, the local legal system inside the United States and other countries, etc., but what you often get is mass murder, mass terror, mass rape and occupation and invasions of foreign countries – the ’supreme international crime’, as indicated at the Nuremberg Trials. There is always going to be a ‘proper reaction’ and an ‘improper reaction’. For me, I recognize that humans are not perfect, so I’m not willing to leave these confrontations to chance. I’d rather they not happened in the first place. But if and when they do happen, I’m not likely to excuse terrorism on either side.

Heaven help the kid who accidentally steps on your flower patch, Pete! What might your common sense response be in that “situ”?

as i said, every situ is different. people react differently to different things. for me, when i’m on a bicycle, i couldn’t imagine slapping or kicking a car unless it was a last resort to save my life, and i couldn’t imagine terrorizing unsuspecting drivers by threating them, unleashing torrents of f-bombs on them, etc. But that’s just me. on the other hand, some things can really set me off. any type of real injustice sets me off, but i’m far from perfect, so trivial things can set me off, too. i’ve never experienced this particular situation, but i imagine if someone slapped or kicked my car because they thought they could treat me like garbage and get away with it, it’d be on. apparently, lots of other folks seem to not like to have their automobile slapped and kicked. crazy, innit?

i try to give folks the benefit of the doubt. i’m most forgiving of kids because i don’t feel like people have a real sense of what’s what until they’re about 25 years old or so. i imagine that a kid stepping on my flower patch would elicit about the same reaction from me that a car sitting in the bicycle lane would get – not much, if anything at all.

and it’s important to note, finally, what the reaction of the bicyclist in this incident _should_ have been – what the appropriate response should have been. we don’t know all the details, and there are plenty of ways to handle this, but my preference would have been to…completely ignore it. to slow down. to go around the car. to get to where i’m going. i wouldn’t stress over it for more than the second and a half it took me to go around the car or for the car to pull ahead of me.

how would you have handled it?

how have you handled it in the past?

Hold up for one moment. So you think it is appropriate to threaten to cut someone’s throat for knocking on someone’s car to let them know they’re in your lane?

No. But it’s to be expected. The answer, of course, is not to bang on people’s cars.

I’m sorry, but labeling tapping on someone’s car terrorism is a gross exaggeration.

now it is ‘tapping’? the article says ’slapped’. have you ever had your car ’slapped’ by cyclist? i imagine it would scare the s**t out of the driver, at least. and once the driver realized that they didn’t run someone over, that instead of it was an above-the-law, profoundly disrespectful cyclist – watch out. i might not label this particular incident ‘terrorism’, but it would depend on the particulars. at a minimum, it sounds like it was a profound disrespect for the driver as a human being, and that, i’m sure, is what provoked the driver’s reaction. it’s completely predictable. lots of cyclists do it and get away with it. this particular cyclist probably thought, “ah – it’s a little Saturn – probably driven by some teen punk” – and then he found out it had a real human inside with a real temper. go figure. would the cyclist have slapped the trunk of an F150, knowing that the driver was probably a guy and might get out and kick his ass? i think probably not, but i could be wrong. some people have a death wish. not me. i don’t slap, punch, or kick cars and trucks that don’t belong to me. period.

So then do you also threaten to shoot people at the supermarket if they cut your place in line?

No. i’ve already answered this by way of my previous answers, but we can make an important point. go to fark.com to read about the over-reactions that people have to the tiniest, simplest incidents every day. google ‘road rage’ and find out how people are injured and murdered around the world for seemingly-innocuous infractions. They are not appropriate reactions, but they happen. Why? Because people are imperfect humans, and the world is a crazy place – car culture is just one of the many contributing factors. A cyclist doesn’t like that some car is in the car lane? They go ballistic. And what happens? The situation escalates out of control in a hurry. Completely. Predictable.

And what about “car terrorism?”

I’ve been writing about criminal car drivers terrorizing cyclists – intentionally and otherwise – for a long time, now, because that’s exactly what it is, and that’s what they are, by definition – ‘car terrorists’.

But this specific labeling issue is boring to me, except for the fact that i strongly believe that cyclists should institute this national code of conduct to prevent bad behavior which hurts cycling and livable communities, etc. If we ignore our own, very real culpability in these matters, we’ll continue to see pathetic rates of bicycle adoption – somewhere in the 0.2 to 1% range – and continued and sometimes increasing resistance to any and all bicycling infrastructure by the non-bicycling community. Again, it’s not just morally right to implement this code of conduct, it’s good politics. People might have legitimate reasons for opposing this code of conduct, but i would suggest that anyone who has been in a position of advocating for cycling in the public realm (lobbying public officials, etc.) would forcefully back this measure.

Somehow I do not think that your “bicycle terrorism” can even remotely compare to the types of hazards that aggravated motorists provide.

Strongly disagree on this one. The psychological scars left by terrorism are very real and damaging. Just ask the victims of terrorism – be they Afghanis or Iraqis or that lady on Mission St i saw come to a complete stop, terrified, as some bicycle terrorist was slapping and kicking her car and screaming obscenities at her. i guarantee she thinks about that every day, worries about it every day, and is affected by it every day.

Your argument is that the little guy should keep his mouth shut or the big roid-raged athlete will kick his ass.

I always stick up for the underdog – the ‘little guy’. It’s one of the main guiding principles of my life.

in this particular incident, i deem the bicyclist’s overreaction to be extreme, counter-productive, and wrong – quite possibly criminal. opinions may differ.

the real issue is not “bicycle terrorism,” but road rage in general

everyone knows that road rage exists – the question is, what do we do about it? I say we help to prevent it by deciding, as a community, what is appropriate behavior on the road. we shouldn’t wait any longer to make this happen. TBL will not be surprised by the hate his clients have experienced on the road, but he need not think it’s an unsolvable problem. There’s a reason Tuscon cops ignore cyclists’ concerns and complaints – it’s the same reason lots of people and organizations ignore and minimize cyclists’ concerns all over the country. We can take real, proactive, corrective measures _right now_ to fix the situation, or we can sit around and cry about it. The world will much more quickly become a much better place for cyclists and drivers alike if we get started on this now.

if someone taps the back of your car

the article said ’slapped’. that’s qualitatively different from a ‘tap’.

it is not acceptable behavior to erupt into threats or actions of physical violence

agreed, in general.

I can understand how a cyclist would be a little pissed off after having almost been run over by a careless motorist.

me too.

the thing is, i realize from my own personal experience as a car driver that i had no appreciation for bicyclists and their fears until…I started riding a bike. so it’s completely plausible to believe that most drivers in the U.S. have exactly zero idea of what it’s like to be riding next to a ton of steel and glass and then be cut off or something similar. we need to change that by getting more people on bikes. that won’t happen if we continue to condone bicycle terrorism. it needs to stop, we need to stop it. we need to denounce it. loudly and proudly. we love our cycling brothers and sisters, but they cannot go around terrorizing people. it’s wholly unacceptable.

for me – if a car starts pushing me into the curb or off the side of the road, i slow down and let them pass, but at that point i’m more interested in living than anything else. that’s just me. but we can and should all decide soon/right now on what is appropriate behavior in these situations, and then go about educating people – including car drivers – about it. setting expectations is key.

Cyclists have no horns

lots of cyclists do, and lots of cyclists must, by law – maybe not here in the u.s., but some places. and maybe it’s a good idea to require horns? i don’t think so, but i don’t condone the punch/slap/kick routine, so we need to agree on _something_.

so if a driver does not see him, then he must yell to be noticed

i’m not talking about the “Hey! Watch where you’re going!” yell when a car is encroaching on a cyclist, i’m talking about the threatening verbal tirades from the bicyclist after the danger has passed.

I ride my bike to get where I’m going, not to protect my immune system.

that’s fine by me. lots of people ride to improve their health, or prevent it from deteriorating further. it’s certainly one of the reasons i ride. but whatever works for you.

Hilarious.

Thank you!

Hilarious.

And what about “car terrorism?” By your logic is it not a terrorist act to honk one’s horn while passing a cyclist to knock him off balance? Is it not terrorism to pass dangerously close to cyclists in order to intimidate them? Is it not a terrorist act to throw things at cyclists? How about shooting cyclists with paintball guns, hitting them with aluminum baseball bats, or charging them with cars? Somehow I do not think that your “bicycle terrorism” can even remotely compare to the types of hazards that aggravated motorists provide. Your argument is that the little guy should keep his mouth shut or the big roid-raged athlete will kick his ass. This isn’t the wild west, such pig-headed alpha-male aggravated behavior is not acceptable on any level.

While some cyclists may act inappropriately by verbally abusing drivers or even vandalizing vehicles (which was not the case here by the way), the real issue is not “bicycle terrorism,” but road rage in general. I don’t care how stressed out you are or what your situation is, if someone taps the back of your car or cuts you off on the freeway, it is not acceptable behavior to erupt into threats or actions of physical violence.

This goes for bicyclists as well, however I can understand how a cyclist would be a little pissed off after having almost been run over by a careless motorist. Perhaps drivers are scared to death when a cyclist yells loudly at them, but also consider that is the only way to be heard! Cyclists have no horns, so if a driver does not see him, then he must yell to be noticed.

EBR